A correspondent asks me what I have against golf. (See https://bernardjporter.com/2024/09/19/zeitgeists/, btl.) Well, it’s not only Trump. (Who apparently cheats at it.)

Firstly, there’s the fact that it has gobbled up so much of our beautiful English countryside, with its unnaturally close-cut grass fairways, and ugly sand-filled ditches (‘bunkers’?), which we proles are always being instructed to ‘keep off!’. Then there’s the sheer nonsense of hitting a ball with a long stick dozens of yards to get it into a tiny hole in the ground – I can’t even imagine a transferable skill that gives you – when it would be far easier to run along and plop it in by hand. Obviously golf is a waste of time, which could be spent doing something useful, like writing a book, or having a nap. Usually one is ‘competing’ only with oneself – have you ever seen Trump with a golf partner? – which makes it a kind of sporting onanism. – ‘Sporting’? Give me a break. Where’s the physical exercise it requires, even? There’s always the walking, I suppose; but these days golfers seem to drive from hole to hole in little electric carts. There can’t be much there to keep one’s body in trim. (Look at Trump, again.)

However, I first took a personal dislike to the game on grounds of class; especially ‘golf clubs’ (not the sticks, but the societies), with their restricted membership – no blacks, proles or, at one time, women; their strict vetting to ensure you were none of these things; their deliberate exclusivity, therefore; and the upper-middle class – or aspiring upper-middle class – way their members talked and behaved. Club golfers were notorious for this, maybe unfairly these days – particularly in Scotland, where the game was invented; but the (supposed) culture put me right off. That prejudice remained with me even when I had to drive my teen-aged son and his friend – and all their golfing paraphernalia – to a local course on one of its ‘free’ non-members’ days, to play there. But then you’d do anything for your boy, wouldn’t you?

All that set up my general aversion. The clincher, however, came when a close friend of mine, a keen golfer, tried to introduce me to the game by taking me for a round on a nine-hole course in Scotland. I’d never held a golf club before; but my first hit (stroke?) turned out to be an unexpectedly good one. Beginner’s luck, of course; but as a joke I pretended it was deliberate, and suggested that my partner use a five-iron (I think it was) when he tee-ed off. (Have I got the terminology right yet?) His immediate response was to insist on fining me two points (runs? goals? strokes?), on the grounds that rule 42 (I think it was) of the Laws of Golf forbade a player giving advice to his or her playing partner.

It was then that I really took against golf. What kind of game was it, I thought, where you can’t try to help another player – even as a sheer beginner, and in jest  – with advice? How could it have turned my great and reasonable friend into such a monster, after just one stroke? It was this experience that made me realise what a thoroughly evil game golf is. No wonder Trump is such a fan.

And the late Margaret Thatcher’s husband, apparently, too. In fact I’ve arrived at the conclusion that golf is the most quintessentially Thatcherite game on the planet, or at least in England; the most individualistic, anti-social (except in the clubhouse over a few gins), easy to cheat at, and basically Tory activity. Now that my son can drive himself there, I’m having nothing more to do with it.

So there you have it, ‘jfkyachts’. (Goddam these pesky pseudonyms!) You imply that you share the same prejudice. Could it be for similar reasons?